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What if someone developed a teleporter, like in Star Trek, tomorrow? We wouldn't need cars. We could just teleport everywhere. You could commute anywhere at the speed of light. Someone should work on this...

Brian H | 4. Juli 2013

The reality is that the original you dies, and a duplicate is formed which thinks it's still the original. But it's not.

risingsun | 4. Juli 2013

It's funny because I googled that question "do you die when you teleport". I think it turns out to be more of a philosophical question of what it means to be alive.

risingsun | 4. Juli 2013

But a guy who invented a teleporter could pretty much bankrupt Tesla and SpaceX, along with the car and space launch industry, overnight. It's just an interesting thought experiment.

PorfirioR | 4. Juli 2013

Tesla already built one. Watch the movie "The Prestige".

Brian H | 4. Juli 2013

Info is sent to the receiving teleporter unit. Could there be two receivers? Unless the answer is a definite, "No, never", then there could be two of you at the far end. They both can't be real. Therefore neither is. Therefore you die on transport.

QED

>:p

carlgo | 4. Juli 2013

Easily done with the new 3D printers. Simply send your image to a printer in the place you want to go to and push "print". The good news is that you will then exist in two places at once (you may anyway, but that is a different story). Real egotists could exist nearly everywhere, which would be annoying at best.

The technology is easily monetized because while nobody may actually want you or me to be where they are, eating their food and raiding the liquor cabinet and all, they sure as heck would like Famous Hot People to show up. So, someone like Kate Upton could charge a hell of a lot for her printed double to be sent to you.

This could be a trillion dollar industry almost immediately.

risingsun | 5. Juli 2013

Brian,

But what constitutes you? The atoms in your body are converted into energy, then transported somewhere and converted back to matter. Don't the atoms in your body constitute you?

carlgo,
Yes cloning would be amazing, but the clone of Kate Upton would be identical to her with her thoughts and expectations. What you need is a modified Kate Upton with low self-esteem and low expectations.

Brian H | 5. Juli 2013

@risingsun;
100% replaced in 7 years, or "replicated", the answer is obviously "No". Two copies each sure they are the original means neither is correct.

And converting mass to energy and back again would involve multiple gigaton H-bombs worth of conversion each way.

carlgo | 5. Juli 2013

@risingsun

Low expectations...I feel so insulted. But, you are right. Why take chances. The best apps would feature a slider bar and I would set it to low. Saves bandwidth too. You don't want to wait around for days downloading features that do you no good.

risingsun | 5. Juli 2013

carlgo,

Yeah, when you clone someone, you are creating a new person. So by what right do you have to tell the Kate Upton clone what to do? Maybe she won't want to do what you want her to do. When the guy living in a trailer park clones Kate Upton, she is going to leave him (unless he drives a Model S). What would be a huge market would be human like sex robots.

PorfirioR | 5. Juli 2013

Nikola Tesla's teleporter machine:

Disposing of the original:

Chris Nolan doesn't get enough credit, in my opinion. Although his movie "The Prestige" was marketed as a drama/mistery, it explored many deep philosophical and moral elements of what constitutes to be real from two points of view, one of which is teleportation and the other being human perception.

There are different philosophies for realism that come into play with the Star Trek idea of teleportation that make the concept messy in many ways, Kate Upton clones notwithstanding. I wonder, had Plato seen Kate's Cat Daddy video and asked about the possibility of a Kate clone, if he might have altered his philosophical theory of reality. We will never know.

Teleporters are, in my opinion, nothing more than a useful literary plot device to get a character to a new scene in the plot without altering the timeline. Teleporters have been appearing in literature for centuries and they have become, like magic wands, an element of fiction that we simply accept without plausible explanation.

Perhaps the closest thing that I have seen to an attempt at acknowledging the physics behind the teleportation problem was in the book/movie "Contact" where the idea of disassembling and reassembling matter were abandoned and relativity came into play.

As far as the Star Trek style teleportation/cloning, nobody has done it better than the movie "Primer" (although with a time factor), but I doubt many people have seen that. The scientific premise in that movie is convincing enough to make even the most skeptical think that it just might work. However, if you watch the movie, you can easily see how morally and philosophically messy things can get. For a humorous take on the same concept, watch the foreign film "Time Crimes".

Quantum teleportation isn't even the least bit like "normal" teleportation though. It's essentially just a fantastically poorly chosen term that gives people completely wrong ideas about what is going on.

Timo | 22. Juli 2013

Cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.

We are thoughts, matter is just means of creating those thoughts like piano is a way to create music.

Teleporting matter that creates same "music" does teleport same person. Even if it appears as copy of the original, then there are two of you, each just as real as just one before copying. Both individuals remember events before teleport same.

There is no death, just stopping of "music". Eventually, somewhere, sometime, that "music" continues.

As of question is teleportation possible I don't know. Maybe with some micro-wormhole combined with quantum teleport-like quantum effect that moves your atoms at the other side of the wormhole as whole.

J.T. | 22. Juli 2013

Lots of misterious spelling errors lately.

J.T. | 22. Juli 2013

BTW, you just know if they did invent this thing and it worked just like Star Trek someone would complain about range and how much electricity it cost to transport.

Many years ago, popular science had a list of the "top ten least likely things to ever be invented" or something like that. Macro teleporters were at the top of the list, above time travel machines.

frmercado | 22. Juli 2013

I agree with Brian on this, at least teleporting understood under the Star Trek perspective.

Two interesting examples of this are when the double of commander Riker is created while teleporting and also the revival of Scotty out of the "pattern" that was saved on the computer of his crashed ship.

These examples do tend to suggest that you cease to exist and then someone who thinks is you reappears, though actually it is not you, just your replicated pattern and the exact copy of you in every way, including your neuron patterns and therefore memories. Though not yourself because you were disintegrated, copied and then replicated.

I would never teleport unless death was imminent; that way at least a me that thinks its me would survive. :)

Timo | 22. Juli 2013

Brain cells do not regenerate in a way that there is exact replacement for dead brain cell, but there are new connections and new brain cells getting in your brain every day. The "common knowledge" that brain does not regenerate is just plain false.

J.T. | 23. Juli 2013

@frmercado

So Bones was on the right track all along!

Brian H | 23. Juli 2013

@fmercado;
I have a worry/theory that the same thing happens every night, and the one who wakes up is a new person with the predecessor's memories. I can't think of any way to disprove this.

Timo | 23. Juli 2013

Or same person, but in different universe?

risingsun | 23. Juli 2013

BrainH there is no way to disprove this. We all could have been popped into existence 5 minutes ago with the memories we have. No way to disprove that. Do you ever feel like you are living in the past. Like you are imagining your past in the future. Like you are walking through a memory?

frmercado | 23. Juli 2013

@Brian.

Kinda scary but true. Every time you wake up it might as well be a different person than you, but there is no way to prove it, since you, yourself, are sure its you.

What would the great Greek philosophers would have made out of all these Sci Fi based ramblings... :P

LionPowered | 23. Juli 2013

Or Indian ones.

olanmills | 24. Juli 2013

This is related to the idea of solopsism, the idea that the only thing that you can be sure of is that your mind exists in some form and that you cannot know with certainty that anything else exists, and perhaps even your memories are a fabrications of your contemporary mind.

You are just a computer program imagining everything. You just imagined me writing this post to you.

olanmills | 24. Juli 2013

@PorfirioR Primer was straight time travel though, not teleportation or disassembly/reassembly, right? Michael Chrichton's book Timeline is about time travel but it also hinges on disassembly and reassembly which is handled a bit differently.

Timo | 25. Juli 2013

Matrix (the first one) played that solopsism very well. What if everything you sense is just a computer simulation? What if you are computer simulation living in computer simulation.

I have sometimes wondered that when our games develop advanced enough, could we notice if some of the chars in simulated world becomes self-aware and thinks it's alive, but because it senses only the game world it would not know it isn't "real". Maybe it just thinks "God, everybody here are dull and stupid".

olanmills | 27. Juli 2013

I can't remember where I read it it, but there is an argument that says that it is more likely that you are a simulation living in a simulated reality rather than you being real. It goes something like this. As computational technologies become more and more advanced, it will eventually become relatively trivial to simulate reality as we know it. If the technology is advanced enough it would probably eventually become cheap for anyone to operate as well (for example, everyone today can go buy an Xbox which has more computational capabilities then the whole world had mere decades ago). Assuming this is possible, then poeple might create these simulations for any number of reasons: for fun, to study, who knows what, etc...

In a world such as this, then it would easily be possible for there to be more simulated beings than "real" beings.

Knowing that's the case, then it would basically be imprudent to assume that you are among the small minority of beings that is real rather than one of the simulated beings that simply thinks oneself real.

For this not to be true either now or sometime in the future, that would mean that it is either impossible to create this technology, or if it is, then people would abstain from using it for some reason.

Alex K | 27. Juli 2013

@olanmills | JULY 27, 2013: I can't remember where I read it it, but there is an argument that says that it is more likely that you are a simulation living in a simulated reality rather than you being real.